Wrapping up our technical issues:

• How does a particular solution implement load balancing?
• Does it introduce new potential bottle necks or points of failure?
• How are distributed server farms dealt with?
• How does it deal with pipelined requests on persistent connections?
• Are SSL sessions handled?

Furthermore, with all of the different approaches to solving the load balancing problem, various platform dependencies and the new set of administrative challenges that server farms introduce, what about price?

Commercial load balancing products range in $3,000 to $100,000 and beyond, usually getting substantially more expensive when distributed load balancing is added to the bill. A number of vendors have established relationships with the big co-location providers sales organizations such as GlobalCenter, Exodus and AboveNet so the possibilities for discounts off the list prices are growing.